Columbus'd the Whim

Twosyllable;
2009

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We've been experiencing a serious boom time for beach music. Because we're talking about indie rock and not say, green energy, that feels like a particularly weird thing to write. Even so, if you read/live on the Internet, too, chances are you've noticed a deluge of dudes taking aim at bringing beach times to your headphones year round. Just by name alone: Wavves brought us bummers, Surfer Blood are sharing huge uppers, and the Underwater Peoples label in D.C. as a whole specializes almost exclusively in Coppertoned escapism/aesthetics. Holiday Shores (formerly Continental Divide) are a Tallahassee five-piece that re-named their band after the Florida street on which lead vocalist Nathan Pemberton grew up. Florida underlined.

Pushing off with a short stretch of vocal harmonizing that somehow echoes Fleet Foxes, opener "Reruns" actually takes on shades of early Shins songs, another Phil Ek-assisted band. Those hooks were spit-polished and very much in tune to the weird bubbles James Mercer zipped them up in. The same kind of relationship between sonics, structure, and environment can be found here. Though Columbus'd the Whim avoids many of the lo-fi-isms that have stamped so many of said summer jams this year, it does share a similar, shoes-untied vibe. That's inherent in the guitar tones (chiming!) and pacing (fluid!) and effects (koozies of reverb and delay!) more than any insistence on the immediacy some associate with garage sloppiness. It's not music for the beach, it's music of the beach. Take "Phones Don't Feud", which lolls along before cutting itself in half with a crash of frothy tremolo, Pemberton surfing the subsequent swirl of trebly guitar and "oooh-aaah" vocal layering as it decrescendos and eventually dissolves away. It's a beautiful way to build a song.

But rarely are Holiday Shores so direct in their approach. As much as Pemberton's vocals sit front row, the reliance on wavy-gravy effects obscures the melodic connections-- so many times this sounds like a band playing from a few blocks away. Most of that problem can be heard in the guitars and the way they chase their tails at times. Listen closely enough to "Edge of Our Lives" and "Errand of Tongue", and you can totally pick up on jazzy, night time strains of the Clientele or even Parachutes-era Coldplay. Before taking a stab at some West African guitar calisthenics, "Bradley Bear" opens with some of the sort of delay-heavy, sopping wet guitar drips that leave you with water in your ears. Those sounds in particular humidify most of the record, but when crammed and sandwiched in between so many ideas (see also: "Tremor Rolls the Peak") it makes for a soggy mess at times. It's why the tunefulness and drive help "Experiencer" stand out as much as it does: all the melody you could ask for, but none of the pruning.